David Madden

As a director, Robert Resnikoff, in his debut feature "The First Power" (citywide), reveals a dynamic flair for action. As a writer, he's hard put to justify all the extreme violence he works up. In this sleek but grisly and far-fetched thriller of the supernatural, he means to terrify us but winds up leaving us merely numb, the usual effect of contrived exploitation fare.

Mistakes happen. It's how a business responds to those mistakes that defines its commitment to customer service. Here's the story of how Bank of America gave the same 10-digit account number to two customers, resulting in about $30,000 in a Riverside man's Social Security payments going astray. But even after the man's relatives pinpointed the problem and brought it to the bank's attention, the family said BofA did little to fix things until the San Bernardino County district attorney's office launched its own investigation.

Of the three Davy Crockett movies now in development, a "Naked Gun"-like spoof--"Davy Crockett: After the Alamo"--could be the first to reach the screen. The other two--Columbia Pictures and producer David Zucker's "Davy Crockett" and Warner Bros. and Interscope's "Crockett and Bowie"--face the usual challenges of ambitiously scaled historical dramas. The most difficult aspect of producing a spoof is finding a clever script.

It's as funny as a banana peel. Or, a guy on laughing gas getting a root canal from a buxom blond. Or, take my wife . . . please! It's vaudeville with a touch of burlesque, a reunion of Mutt and Jeff. It's "The Sunshine Boys" doing "The Out of Towners," starring those grumpy old men, directly from the Borscht Belt table at the Friars Club. Let's hear it for them, ladies and germs: Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau.

"Blind Fury" (throughout San Diego County) is a numskull, cornball action comedy about an American soldier in Vietnam who, blinded in battle, is nursed back to health by villagers and schooled in the art of swordsmanship. The blind-swordsman gimmick derives from the Japanese "Zatoichi" series, but Japanese action scenarios have often provided rousing starting points for Westernized reworkings--witness "The Seven Samurai."

After last year's season finale of "The Killing" generated howls of indignation, the show's blindsided creative team began worriedly plotting to win back their audience. What if the show's central mystery was answered — something implicitly promised in its first season promotional campaign "Who killed Rosie Larsen?" — in the opening episode of the new season, which begins April 1? After lengthy discussions, executives at AMC and the show's production company, Fox Television Studios, ultimately decided against the highly unusual step, according to a person familiar with those talks who was not authorized to speak about them publicly.

You've got to kiss a lot of frogs, contemporary T-shirts insist, to come up with a prince, and anyone eager to see Julia Roberts kissing Richard Gere in "Runaway Bride" will also leave with a bad taste in their mouths. Ever since "Pretty Woman" topped out as the highest-grossing film of 1990, Hollywood has been desperate to re-team co-stars Roberts and Gere with that film's genial director, Garry Marshall.

Federal court officials declared a judicial emergency Tuesday in Arizona, allowing courts to delay criminal trials up to six months because of a shortage of judges worsened by the shooting death two weeks ago in Tucson of the state's chief jurist. Arizona federal courts were already overwhelmed by a 65% increase in criminal cases in the last two years and two judicial vacancies when U.S. District Judge John M. Roll was killed in the Jan. 8 attack that also severely wounded Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.

"The Out-of-Towners" teams Steve Martin and Goldie Hawn as an attractive baby-boomer couple from Ohio who fly off to Manhattan for the husband's interview at a top ad agency only to be plunged into a nightmare of foul-ups. If the film's title and premise sound familiar that's because back in 1970 Neil Simon, director Arthur Hiller, Jack Lemmon and the late Sandy Dennis made a movie of the same name, at once funny and rueful, about just how many things can go wrong for newcomers in the Big Apple.